The door was opened by the usher. There was no invitation to dinner from the British Ambassador.

'I have the honour, sir, to wish you a very good day.'

If Mr. Melville departed in any perturbation, it was only to see England represented in Venice at such a time by such a man. When he came to contrast the shrewd smoothness of Lallemant—one who had won to his position by the proofs of ability he had afforded—with the stiff-necked stupidity of Sir Richard Worthington—who no doubt owed his appointment to birth and influence—he began to ask himself whether, after all, there might not be grounds for the republican doctrines which had found application in France and which everywhere in Europe were now in the air; whether the caste to which he belonged was not indeed already an effete anachronism, to be shovelled by men of sense out of the path of civilization and progress.

These misgivings, however, did not sink so far as to imperil the championship of the cause of aristocracy to which he was pledged. After all, he belonged to that caste; the recovery of his estates of Saulx depended upon the restoration of the monarchy in France, and this restoration could not take place until the anarchs were brought to their knees and broken. Personal profit apart, however, the cause was one to which by birth he owed his loyalty, and loyally he would spend himself in its service, right or wrong.

From the austere English lady, his mother, he had inherited a lofty and even troublesome sense of duty, which his education had further ingrained.

An instance of this is afforded by the order in which he handled the matters concerned with his presence in Venice. That affair of his own primarily responsible for the journey—and one which might well have justified impatience—was yet to be approached. His approach of it now may have gathered eagerness because Sir Richard Worthington's cavalier treatment of him rendered it politically as necessary as previously it had been personally desirable.

When, on the death of his father Marc-Antoine had undertaken at the call of duty to his house and caste that hazardous and all but fatal journey into France, Count Francesco Pizzamano was, and had been for two years, Venetian Minister in London. His son Domenico, an officer in the service of the Most Serene Republic, was an attachè at the Legation, and between him and Marc-Antoine a friendship had grown which had presently embraced their respective families. Gradually Marc-Antoine's interest in Domenico had become less than his interest in Domenico's sister, the Isotta Pizzamano, whom Romney painted, and whose beauty and grace are extolled in so many memoirs of the day.

The events—first Marc-Antoine's excursion into France and then the recall of Count Pizzamano—had interrupted those relations. It was his ardent desire to resume them, now that the way was clear, which had dictated his journey to Venice.

A thousand times in the last month he had in fancy embraced Domenico, gripped the hand of the Count and pressed his lips upon the fingers of the Countess, and more lingeringly upon the fingers of Isotta. Always she was last in that recurring day-dream. But at the same time infinitely more vivid than the others. Always he saw her clearly, tall and slender with a quality of queenliness, of saintliness, in which your true lover's worshipping eyes will ever array his mistress. Yet always in that fond vision she melted from her virginal austerity: the vivid, generous lips in that otherwise nunlike face smiled a welcome that was not only kindly but glad.

This dream he was speeding now to realize, in an anticipation almost shot with apprehension, as all things too eagerly anticipated ever must be.

CHAPTER VI

CASA PIZZAMANO

His gondola brought him to the marble steps of the Casa Pizzamano on the Rio di San Daniele, by the Arsenal, as the summer dusk was deepening into night.

He came in a shimmer of black satin with silver lace, a silver-hilted sword worn through the pocket. A jewel glowed in the fine old Valenciennes at his throat, and paste buckles sparkled on his lacquered shoes.

He stepped into a wide hall whose walls were inlaid with marble, where the red-liveried porter was lighting the lamp set in a great gilded lantern that once had crowned the poop of a Venetian galley. By a wide marble staircase he was conducted to an anteroom on the mezzanine, whilst a lackey to whom he gave the name of Mr. Melville went in quest of Captain Domenico Pizzamano, for whom the visitor had asked.

Some moments only was he kept waiting, with quickening pulses. Then the door opened, to admit a young man who, in his tall slimness and proud, darkly handsome face, was so reminiscent of his sister that Mr. Melville momentarily seemed to see her in him.

The young captain stood at gaze upon the threshold, his expression almost scared, his hand trembling on the cut-glass door knob.

Marc-Antoine advanced briskly, smiling. 'Domenico!'

The lips, so red against the pallor which had slowly overspread the Venetian's face, parted now. But his voice was husky as it ejaculated in French: 'Marc! Is it really you? Marc!'

Marc-Antoine opened wide his arms. 'Here to my heart, Domenico, and assure yourself that it is really I, in bone and blood and sinew.'

Domenico flung forward to embrace him. Thereafter he held him at arm's length, and scanned his face. 'Then you were not guillotined?'

'My neck is witness that I was not.' Nevertheless he became grave. 'But have you believed it all this while?'

'It was the last news we had of you before we left London. For your poor mother, who so bitterly upbraided herself for having sent you, it was the end of the world. We did what we could.'

'Oh, yes. I know how good you all were. It strengthens my love of you. But my letters, then? I wrote twice. Ah, but letters in these days are like shots fired into the dark. We don't know where they'll go. The more reason why I should come to render my accounts in person.'

Domenico was very solemnly considering him. 'That is why you've come? You have journeyed all the way to Venice, to come to us?'

'That is the cause. If I happen to be charged with other matters that is a mere effect.'

The solemnity of the young Venetian's eyes increased. His glance searched almost uneasily the flushed and smiling face of his friend. He faltered a little in answering. 'You make us very proud.' And he went on to mention the joy to his parents of this visit and the miracle of Marc-Antoine's survival.

'And Isotta? She is well, I trust.'

'Oh, yes. Isotta is well. She, too, will be glad to see you.'

Marc-Antoine detected a vague embarrassment. Did the rogue suspect what particular member of the House of Pizzamano had drawn him across Europe? His smile broadened at the thought, and he was very gay and exalted in mood when he came to the salon where the family was assembled.

It was a vast room that ran the entire depth of the palace, from the Gothic windows of the balcony above the Canal of San Daniele to the fluted pillars of the loggia over-looking the garden. It was a room made rich by treasures which the Pizzamani had assembled down the ages, for their patrician house went back to a time before the closure of the Grand Council and the establishment of the oligarchy in the fourteenth century.

A Pizzamano had been at the sack of Constantinople, and some of the enduring spoils he had brought home were here displayed. Another had fought at Lepanto, and his portrait painted by Veronese, against a background of red galleys, faced the entrance. There was a portrait by Giovanni Bellini of Caterina Pizzamano who had reigned as a Dogaressa in Bellini's day, and another by Titian of a Pizzamano who had been Governor of Cyprus, and yet another noteworthy one from an unknown brush of that Giacomo Pizzamano who had been created a Count of the Empire two hundred years ago, and so had brought the title to these patricians of a state that bestowed no titles.

The coffered ceiling bore frescoes by Tiepolo in frames that were nobly carved and gilded, the floor was of rich wood mosaics, with here and there a glowing rug that evoked memories of the Serenissima's Levantine traffic.

It was a room which for splendour of art, of wealth, and of historical significance could be found in no country of Europe but Italy, and in no city of Italy but Venice.

Its glories were only vaguely revealed to Marc-Antoine in the soft glow of candlelight from clusters of tapers in great golden branches fantastically chiselled, their bases set with stones of price. They had been the gift of a Pope to a long dead Pizzamano, together with the Golden Rose, and it was believed that Cellini's hands had wrought them.

But it was not to the treasures of the room that Marc-Antoine turned his eager eyes. He sought its inhabitants.

They had been seated in the loggia: the Count, very tall and spare and gaunt with age, a little old-fashioned in his dress, from his red-heeled shoes to his powdered wig, but of an aquiline countenance full of energy and vigour; the Countess, still comparatively young, gracious and noble, and bearing about her something as elusively fine and delicate as the point de Venise of her fichu; and Isotta, her tall, straight slenderness stressed by the sheathing indoor gown, of a material so dark as to seem almost black in the half-light.

It was upon her that his eyes came to rest as he stood to face them where they had risen, startled by Domenico's announcement. She was framed, with the fading turquoise of the evening sky for background, between two slender columns of the loggia, columns of marble which had been weathered to the tone of ivory, and as pale as was now that face which held for Marc-Antoine the sum of all nobility and loveliness. Her very lips seemed pale, and her dark eyes, the normal softness of whose glance tempered the austerity of her features, were dilated as she stared at him.